More than a declaration, Juneteenth was a day that America’s dishonesty unraveled
Legally, Katie Darling was already free on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, under federal instruction to occupy the Confederate state. Backed by almost two thousand Union soldiers, Granger stood on a balcony in the center of town reading General Orders, No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free...
“Abraham Lincoln didn’t free the slaves,” she replied with frustration. “The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free them either. Black people freed themselves.” Speaking decades later, she still vividly remembered the battles of the Civil War, when Union and Confederate soldiers met at Mansfield: “Massas’s field am all tore up with cannon holes and ever’ time a cannon fire, missy go off in a rage. One time when a cannon fire, she say to me, ‘You li’l black wench, you niggers ain’t gwine be free. You’s made to work for white folks.’” When her master came back at the end of the war, he planned to abide by the order to let them go.
Even a woman as famous for her courage and impetus as Harriet Tubman spoke of the unfamiliarity of liberation: “I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home after all, was down in Maryland; because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there. But I was free, and they should be free.
Though some of them may have achieved freedom upon the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation or even the 13th Amendment, the backlash of a racist society did not go away. Similarly, Juneteenth was not a day that immediately allowed people to escape. Confederate government officials barred Black people from leaving their white masters, while others who did escape were rounded up and forced into military service for the Union Army. Even in Northern states, discrimination ran rampant.
An eventual six years after legal emancipation, Darling’s community’s fight for her freedom prevailed. The mistress threatened her with one hundred lashings for not keeping the plantation’s cows and calves separate. No matter how much the mistress wanted to defer Darling’s emancipation, freedom was imminent. That exchange was the last they ever had.
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